Earlier today, the company tweeted: “The servers are overloaded but we’re working on it! We will be back up ASAP. #caseofthemondays” That was six hours ago — yes, six. Since then, no signs of life. The mobile apps are down, the website is down, it’s all down. A half hour ago, the company updated: “Our server team is hard at work, but it looks like we’ll be down for a bit longer. We hate downtime as much as you do! #badcaseofthemondays”

I’ll say.

Downtime is also nothing new for Foursquare, but they have managed to be relatively stable in the past few months despite rapid growth — and new versions of the service rolling out. It would seem that whatever the issue is today, it’s probably some kind of failure in the fall-back systems that led to a total collapse.

This happened to Facebook recently, but they also have several times the engineers of Foursquare to be able to get things back up relatively quickly (about an hour of downtime).